A few years ago Naomi Klein’s excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism caught the truth of permanent crisis when she described Milton Friedman’s flippant statement on capital opportunities during crises:

[Milton Friedman] observed that “only a crisis— actual or perceived— produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”1

In my last post A Planetary Crisis: The Dark Side of War and Refugee PlightI’ve been wondering about both US and EU policies and how most of what we see in the world today has been brought about by the shock doctrines that Klein portrays in her detailed examination of global capitalism under the auspices of this neoliberal doctrine of…